Thank God the elections are over!

My life is a beautiful mess. It has been a mess for quite a while. I grew up in a Southern Baptist household, and my fundamentalist parents embodied the greatest example of courageous and craze-filled love I ever witnessed. I left their household to attend Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School. Seven years in the ivory tower would be followed by eight years in the inner city, beginning when I moved into Houston’s Denver Harbor in 2004. Denver Harbor is a 95% Latino neighborhood and embodies the joys and struggles of America’s immigrant communities. Two years after my move into the inner city, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, a historically African-American congregation in Houston’s 5th Ward, and its pastor took me under their wings as one of their ministers. I did not know then and do not know now why Pleasant Hill wanted me, but perhaps part of the reason is that they are a bit of a beautiful mess themselves. What I know for sure is that Pleasant Hill, like my fundamentalist parents and immigrant neighbors, is an indispensable components of the messy life I love.

Joel Goza

Marty invited me to share a series of reflections with his readership to display how the crosswinds of Southern Baptist conservatism, Denver Harbor and 5th Ward shape how I approach living out my faith. My reflections find their roots in the various ministry endeavors of the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church that attempt to embody God’s love to the 5th Ward community in practical and earthy forms. Pleasant Hill’s ministries lack exhaustive answers to the trials and challenges of America’s urban crisis. Our ministries are works in progress, fragile and experimental attempts to display Christ’s love from a church living on society’s margins. Pleasant Hill’s fragile, experimental and marginalized ministries express a longing for that day when Christ gathers His suffering sheep around His throne and:

Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them,’ nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Rev. 7:16-17)

Any investments inspired by this ultimate destination, regardless of how fragile, experimental or marginal, are not insignificant, but provide voice to our truest hopes and desires for intimacy with God and one another under the Lordship of Christ.

With this as the backdrop, on to my first reflection: Thank God the elections are over! Political conversations between my family and I are filled with awkward silences possible only between people deeply in love, deeply confused and lacking solutions to the world’s wounds. Unsurprisingly for Southern Baptists, my parents cast mixed-emotions ballots for Mitt Romney. Unsurprisingly, as a member of a predominately African-American church, I cast a mixed-emotions ballot for Barack Obama. Like people throughout the nation, neither my family nor I felt either candidate perfectly embodied our concerns, so we found ourselves selecting between various virtues and vices of strong but nonetheless imperfect candidates. On election night, I attempted to sympathize with the sackcloth and ashes mood family members communicated on Facebook as they attempted to sympathize with my poignant hopes that will likely disappoint.

Election time makes family time precarious business. Thank God the election is over. Voting is the least Christians can do, but Christian political engagement is not an every two to four year proposition. It is an everyday calling. Thank God, my Republican-leaning family and my Democrat-leaning self are again free to work side by side for the sake of Christ’s “least of these” (Matt. 25). Such work is the primary political calling for disciples, and we call such work worship. Why? Because intimacy with at-risk teens, struggling veterans, the sick and poor is fellowship with Christ Himself. In such work, truly Jesus, “a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering” (Isaiah53:3), is still with us. Living in Denver Harbor and working in the 5th Ward opened my eyes to the reality that the greatest political failure for Christians in Houston is not at the voting booth. The greatest political failing for most Christians in Houston is the lack of intimacy we experience with those suffering in society’s shadows – making us unable to recognize Christ in the broken humanity of our neighbors.

I possess no interest in seeing Christians unite under the banner of any political party. My prayer is to see the Lordship of Christ trump social divides, to see a Christ-centered intimacy replace a socially produced enmity in our city. If a lack of intimacy with communities like Denver Harbor and 5th Ward acts as a hallmark for the church’s political failings, perhaps such communities also mark the location of the church’s greatest opportunity to faithfully hear the gospel’s call to bless the world that Christ loved.

No doubt awkward silences will continue to hold their rightful place in conversations with my family. That is no tragedy. What would be tragic is if in the midst of the silences we failed to hear God’s calling to “proclaim the good news for the poor and bind up the broken hearted” (Isaiah 61:1). It has taken me years to understand what I should have learned from simply reading the New Testament: Christian unity, at its best, does not mean that we will agree on everything. Rather, Christian unity, at its best, means meaningful disagreements that make both parties more faithful disciples.